


The Awful Edges

by GretchenSinister



Series: GretchenSinister's Second Blacksand Week [1]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: End of the World, Or Is It?, Other, eldritch guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23101759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: For Blacksand Week 2, Day 1, Glitter and Doom***Okay, so theoretical mathematics, right? Honestly I don’t understand pure math, but I do know that as it gets less pure you can start applying it to the real world more and more and eventually you get physics. Okay okay okay. Well, the thing is, with mathematical systems, you always have to make some assumptions that you can’t prove. And sometimes the best you can do is to prove that your system works as long as arithmetic works. That is, as long as 2 is not equal to 1 (which is actually really difficult to prove mathematically and one of the proofs which claims to do so isn’t valid because it includes division by zero).But everyone knows that 2 isn’t equal to 1. If it was, the world would be a very different place.(More doom than glitter here, maybe?)
Relationships: Pitch Black/Sanderson Mansnoozie
Series: GretchenSinister's Second Blacksand Week [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1660444
Kudos: 2
Collections: Blacksand Short Fics





	The Awful Edges

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 11/10/2013. (Well before the "porn with math" meme but, well...clearly it did not spring ex nihilo.)

The stars were falling, as they knew they would. Millions upon millions of those once-so-steady beacons cascaded down in a fall of titanic glitter, covering the night sky with the glimmering trails they left behind.

If anyone was awake to see it, the beauty might strike them speechless. If anyone was awake to see it, after gaping in wonder for a time, they might shake themselves out of their reverie as they remembered that stars cannot fall like that, that the universe is not ordered in such a way so that when the stars fall they would fall to Earth in double handfuls of light. If anyone was awake to see it, they would not be comforted by this thought as they saw that the sky behind the star-fall was utterly black, and, even as their eyes adjusted, did not begin to re-light with the stars they thought of as real, the giants of burning gas hurtling safely and sanely through a galaxy measured rationally in light-years.

But no one was awake to see it. Over all the Earth, every single human being was asleep and dreaming.

Now, the only two who could have seen the stars falling were well above the Earth, their forms, if forms they could be said to have, twining over and around and through each other, the gold of one brighter than the shine of the falling stars, the black of the other darker than the void the stars left behind. They were not paying attention to the stars. All they had minds for now, vast and inhuman though their minds were, was the sensation of gold aether merging with black ichor, the sensation of one consciousness flowing into another until the other was found to be the same as the one, until the black and gold of their ornamental selves shuddered so with the joy of that knowledge that they lost all that they had once known of the edges between them, until there were no more boundaries and two and one were no longer different from each other.

And so minds slept and stars fell and they could not care.

For a long time, they had not even considered the possibility of crossing such boundaries. Then, when they had been Dream and Nightmare, each had understood that they were to be the enemy of the other. All their forms and actions reflected this understanding, that their one purpose was to always be two.

As time passed, and they discovered themselves gaining personalities like those possessed by the humans whose subconscious minds formed their battlegrounds. They began to frequent one form above others, and sometimes they forgot their origins as beings of balance, as beings who enabled two to be different from one. They began to converse with other beings. Nightmare gained the name Pitch Black. Dream gained the name Sandman. They acted with new purposes now, and forgot everything of their origins save that they were connected, in some deep and inalienable way, to the other.

The battles they fought then did not fully satisfy the needs of that connection. They began to talk, in symbols visual and auditory, enough of their old selves still awake that they saw little difference between the two. They formed a truce, in secret, though they knew their new friends and enemies could not really stop them if they wanted to.

And then, one night, Sandy reached out a small golden hand to grasp Pitch’s larger gray one.

Perhaps they had grown too enamored of their forms, then, for at that touch, as each felt the particular texture of the other’s skin, as each felt the warmth of the other’s flesh, all the rest of their thoughts fled in favor of more, so much more, of the same. In their bodies they worshiped each other, gold flesh on gray and gray flesh on gold, endlessly enamored by every straining tendon, every ample handful, the ways too-ardent kisses could bruise skin intoxicatingly sweet or smoky, the way even _their_ hair could tangle, could fall around their faces with enough sweat, with enough time spent on their backs while the other gazed down greedily and worked with ever-greater skill to bring the one beneath them to ecstasy. Oh, yes, they were enamored of their forms then, for they only bothered with small changes for many, many years, Sandy always remaining small and round, Pitch always remaining tall and lean, even as they explored wildly and joyously all the ways of men with men, men with women, and women with women.

Yet after a time they began to long for something even greater. Their intimacies had not returned knowledge of their older selves to them, but it had made them aware that they were far more than Pitch and Sandy and their bodies, no matter how wonderful they were.

They began to shift forms more often now, unconsciously eroding their solidity, slowly returning to how they once were—but not quite.

For their former roles as beings both utterly balanced and utterly opposed were positions they could now never return to. The knowledge that they should be two, and not one, had fallen from their minds forever, perhaps with that first touch of skin on skin, that touch that they lamented now, as it signified a separation that they desperately desired to erase.

Enough did linger in their memories, however, for both to know that some grand change must take place when they were able to relinquish any physical form and become one, but Pitch did not care, for the world had never welcomed him, and Sandy had seen enough change to hope that this one might not be a catastrophic end, but rather a new beginning. Even though the stars would fall…

Their love for each other then was such that neither believed it would have been possible to feel something so powerful without it being both necessary and right.

They did not know their last physical kiss was going to be so, but it could not have been more ardent had they known. So focused were they on the kiss, that, in truth, neither could have pinpointed the moment in which they became ethereal, in which slender fingers no longer cupped round cheeks, in which golden palms no longer stroked a long neck. When they did notice, feeling the beginning of the kind of connection they had longed for, they could not restrain themselves, but flew around the world, vast and dark and shimmering and elated. And all below them slid into deep sleep brightened by the most vivid dreams any human mind had ever held.

Finally, the ones who had been Pitch and Sandy slowed their flight, and began to come together, slowly at first, tentatively, as they reached out into dimensions they had never been aware of while loving each other before, and then in earnest, both desiring nothing more, nor less, than unity with the other.

And the stars began to fall.

A Pitch-piece in the new one worried to a Sandy-piece that maybe they had gone too far. Another Sandy-piece was surprised, and warmth flooded through the mind/s of all the new one. No, they had not gone far enough. The stars had fallen. The stars had left a blank canvas. They must keep going, inhabit themselves more fully, bring their unimaginable love to a yet more unimaginable conclusion. The sleepers below must wake eventually. And they must make a new world for them to awaken in.

A world where two were equal to one.


End file.
